Roy Orbison – The Essential Roy Orbison Sings Lonely and Blue Crying in Dreams

People reach for adjectives like “weird” and “otherworldly,” “eerie” and “haunting” when describing Roy Orbison and his music. These word choices mean to underscore the ways in which Orbison stood apart from his rock-and-pop contemporaries. But such descriptions have the effect of separating Orbison from the sounds and trends of his era, as if he were not, like each of us, a person completely of his time.

He sure looked different. Perhaps — considering Orbison eventually cloaked his weak eyes behind dark and thick prescription sunglasses, and the way his raven black pompadour clashed with the pallor of his skin; and recalling all those songs about dreams and, of course, his trembling, sky-scraping tenor — perhaps he wasn’t even quite real. As Colin Escott has cleverly observed, “even the name ‘Roy Orbison’ had a touch of unreality. Do you know anyone else called ‘Orbison’?”

Conventional wisdom is that he was unlike any and all other singers, before or since. And the “weird” factor only intensified after director David Lynch sparked Orbison’s 1980s comeback by having the singer re-record one of his most indelible songs, “In Dreams”, for that genuinely haunting scene in Blue Velvet.

But the original “In Dreams” — the one with the buoyant strings but without a lip-synching sociopath — isn’t a creepy record, and wasn’t heard that way when it was a top-10 hit in 1963. Rather, like so much of Orbison’s work, the original “In Dreams” is…fanciful. And not in any delusional or menacing sense, either, but wistfully so, achingly, and — very important, this — playfully.

There’s no better example of what I mean here than the song’s famous opening line: “A candy-colored clown they call the sandman tiptoes through my room every night.” Orbison’s plea for a dream of the lover who has abandoned him is closer to, say, The Nutcracker (television versions aired in 1958 and 1961) or to Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams” (a crossover country hit from that same year) than to Lynch’s nightmare.

More specifically, “In Dreams” alludes to the Chordettes’ 1954 pop smash, “Mr. Sandman” (“send me a dream”). Orbison mines a conceit here that, while not exactly a pop cliche, was hardly sui generis, either.

What is it about Orbison’s records that feels so different? Many explanations have been posited over the years, none of them very satisfactory.

Is it Orbison and producer Fred Foster’s oft-noted use of rhythmic and countermelodic nonsense syllables? Definitely not. Any doo-wop fan would have been right at home with the “Dum-dum-dum, dum-dee-do-wah” that launched Orbison’s first big hit, “Only The Lonely”, or the “Sha la la, dooby wah, bum bum bum, yip yip bum” that kicked off his follow-up, “Blue Angel”. And in the early ’60s, remember, radio was smack in the middle of a doo-wop revival.

Did Orbison’s records sound so different because of their lush, swelling arrangements or, perhaps, because of their sometimes faintly Latin-inflected rhythms? Not in an era when Orbison’s chart rivals included Phil Specter and Motown, “This Magic Moment” and “Save The Last Dance For Me”, the West Side Story soundtrack and the albums of Perez Prado.

Did the Orbison “trick” reside in the intense drama of his vocal attack, particularly the way he flew his voice to such unexpected heights? The word people choose here is “operatic,” but even that’s misleading. Orbison’s vocals were more influenced by the Mexican singing he heard growing up in west Texas than by any love of opera. More to my point, the vibrato and soaring crescendos and gulping emotionalism that mark Orbison’s style also just happen to have marked the style of many of his pop contemporaries and their immediate predecessors.

Such as, to cite only a few examples: Tony Bennett, Johnny Ray, Jackie Wilson, Tony Williams of the Platters, Roy Hamilton, the Conway Twitty of “It’s Only Make Believe”, and the pop recordings of Mario Lanza, as well as the music of Johnny Mathis, Gene Pitney, Perry Como, and, uh, Bobby “Blue Velvet” Vinton.

Even something so seemingly unprecedented as Orbison’s dramatic, soaring style of balladry was completely of a piece with his era, a style that was not just here and there but practically everywhere, common currency. One more example: You probably know that Orbison’s “Only The Lonely” and such Orbisonesque kin as Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry” and Elvis Presley’s “It’s Now Or Never” were all recorded with the same Nashville sessions pros. But did you know they were recorded the same week?

Orbison’s three albums for Monument Records have now been reissued, marking what would have been the singer’s 70th year. Each of them — Sings Lonely And Blue from 1960, Crying from 1962 and In Dreams from ’63 — is a rock ‘n’ roll classic, Nashville Sound division. Excellence aside, however, they are also entirely conventional records that include, alongside singles such as “Crying” and “Running Scared”, covers of Don Gibson songs and recent hits by the Platters and Jim Reeves, as well as exquisite renderings of what were, even then, hoary chestnuts such as Johnny Ray’s “Cry”, Johnny Mercer’s “Dream”, and Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer”.

What to make of this? Well, for one thing, Orbison, to his immense credit, was a rock ‘n’ roller who wanted to get real gone but who also wanted to come to terms with, embrace even, the Hit Parade as it had existed for decades — all the supposed schlock that, we’re told, rock ‘n’ roll sneered at and replaced.

You might miss all this, though, and much more, if all you have to go on is The Essential Roy Orbison, a two-disc collection that mistakes some interesting footnotes for key parts of the text. The most egregious example of this is that The Essential includes five tracks from Orbison’s 1989 comeback album Mystery Girl — fully half that Jeff Lynne-produced album — but a paltry four cuts from the entirety of Orbison’s MGM tenure, where the Big “O” spent nearly a decade and released 11 LPs.

The Essential Roy Orbison also omits entirely the singer’s pre-Sun RCA recordings, and includes not one track from the albums he released between his departure from MGM and his late ’80s return to prominence. And a disc titled The Essential Roy Orbison that doesn’t feature the Traveling Wilburys’ “Handle With Care” can’t possibly live up to its billing. Orbison’s aching turn on the bridge of that 1988 hit single not only solidified his comeback but stands with the most thrilling moments of a career full of them.

The 1963 “In Dreams” is missing too, replaced by the inferior Blue Velvet version. It’s in those original grooves that we can hear the essential Roy Orbison: the exemplary execution of its era’s crooning, vibrato-laden phrasing, bolero beat and pleading climaxes; the sweet evocation of swirling-stringed dreams; but also the one obviously unique quality about Roy Orbison and his music…

That voice, all west Texas pinched and nasal, a tenor with a tone — a texture, really — that feels lonely and elegant, sobbing yet stoic, and like no one else’s we’ve ever heard.